Zbrush armor piece problem

Asim7

So I have a character. currently hidden in the scene. And I imported this maya model of his armor piece, I would like to Zremesh it but keep the overall structure.

My problem is that no matter what I do, the armor loses the sharp edge on the lower front chest area and around the armpit area the edge totally disapears into a smooth blob. It also gets these blocky squares, all over.

I tried different Zremsh settings, tried sub dividing it before doing it and without, tried using polygroups and also using the Zremesher guide brush. Nothing seems to work

Any help or tips on how I could, or how you would go about doing something like this? 

Thank you very much!  

Obscura

How is it supposed to know what you want sharp and what you want smooth? There is even a similar angle on the bottom. Subdivision can be controlled by adding support loops where you want to keep the edge sharp. So add 2 edges on the 2 sides close to the original edge where you wand it to stay sharp after smashing subdivide.

cryrid

You can also just add some creases to the desired edges after zremeshing. 

Kanni3d

Creasing is your best option to stay within zbrush and not export/import it, even make it into a new polygroup and zremesh with groups option may help.

Asim7

Kanni3d said:

Creasing is your best option to stay within zbrush and not export/import it, even make it into a new polygroup and zremesh with groups option may help.

I tried creasing it, having creases go all around every shard edge and the potruding part. But the corner still gets softened, blurred out. I might try re making some of the mesh flow, perhaps that will help. Thank you, i'll show an update if it works/dosn't work.

Asim7

Obscura said:

How is it supposed to know what you want sharp and what you want smooth? There is even a similar angle on the bottom. Subdivision can be controlled by adding support loops where you want to keep the edge sharp. So add 2 edges on the 2 sides close to the original edge where you wand it to stay sharp after smashing subdivide.

Any idea why it still makes everything else so blocky though? I tried creasing and support loops, and it works. But not at the corners, around the armpit And there are no creases or anything on the rest of the piece, yet it still gets very blocky even with smooth turned on or with zremesh.

Obscura

Add the creases or support loops any apply subdivision intead of zremesher and stuff. Subdivision works like this:
imagine a rectangle of any proportion. Now imagine that you split it into 4 quarters. Subdivision done. What comes from this is that if you have some tight edge loops around the areas that you want to keep sharp, after applying the subdiv, because of the proportion of those support edges, the areas that you want to be sharp will have much more polygon density than the rest, so the edges are close, so its possible to make them sharp.

See the long thin edges being used to control the sharpness of the subdivision.

kanga

1/ Import the new mesh.

2/ If it is low poly then subdivide the import.

3/ Duplicate the mesh.

4/ Zremesh the duplicate until the topology is how yo want it.

5/ Take both meshes down to their base subD

6/ Project the original import onto the duplicate and do this for every subD level.

Asim7

kanga said:

1/ Import the new mesh.

2/ If it is low poly then subdivide the import.

3/ Duplicate the mesh.

4/ Zremesh the duplicate until the topology is how yo want it.

5/ Take both meshes down to their base subD

6/ Project the original import onto the duplicate and do this for every subD level.

Thank you, this seems to have worked